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Review of Policy Research
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Science & Technology
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The Long Shadow: Nuclear Weapons and Security in 21st Century Asia. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press. xviii + 571 pages. ISBN 9780804760867, $75.00 cloth.
ISBN 9780804760874, $29.95 paper. Muthiah Alagappa (Ed.). 2008.
The one issue that consumed the United States’ strategic policy community like
none other, from August 6, 1945 to the end of the Cold War, was the role of nuclear
weapons in the confrontation between, especially, the United States and the USSR.
To students born after the fall of the Soviet Union—all freshmen now—events like
the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis appear on the page but are clouded in a mist
of ignorance, disbelief, and generational separation.
To the relief of this reader Muthiah Alagappa, Distinguished Research Fellow of
the East–West Center in Hawaii, has assembled a force of 19 contributors to dispel the
mist and bring clarity to an examination of the role of nuclear weapons in what we
must term a “new strategic era.” Also, thankfully, he has limited this examination to
the Asian strategic environment. Clearly, it is where the action is as the twenty-first
century is entered. Alagappa has chosen wisely in assembling the specialists who have
accompanied him on this very useful journey. In addition to the editor’s introductory
analysis where he provides a historical framework and theoretical structure for the
first 100 pages of the work, he has his team cover the major issues in the nuclear
debates ongoing in the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North
Korea, Iran, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and the ASEAN states. He
includes one of the major elements of the twenty-first century not present in the
stand-off of the last century, the role of non-state actors and the possible use of nuclear
weapons by terrorists undeterred by the historic tools of mutual intimidation.
While I applaud all the contributions of this lengthy volume, it is the final two
chapters that we see Alagappa at his best as he ties together the contributions of the
many specialists involved in this effort. His conclusion brings forth very clearly that
deterrence—thankfully the premier application of nuclear weapons’ potential after
August 1945—will continue to dominate the strategic planning of the states of Asia.
Extended deterrence provided by the United States to its key allies in Asia was seen
as especially important and continuing. Only terrorists and other non-state actors
will contemplate a crossing of the deterrence line. Therefore, Alagappa sees a role
for nuclear weapons in stabilizing regional relations that were once subject to wild
swings from peace to intense conflict. In this sense, the introduction of nuclear
weapons in the Indian and Pakistani context has played a role to dampen the
rhetoric and increase the tendency for dialog vice diatribe. Having made these
useful connections in reviewing the regional “hot spots” of Asia, the editor calls
upon the region and the international arms control community to respond to this
new nuclear environment by forging a new nuclear order with efforts to include all
nuclear weapon states in the world’s non-proliferation regime. This, of course,
Review of Policy Research, Volume 27, Number 2 (2010)
© 2010 by The Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved.
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means a restructuring of the arms control and non-proliferation framework so that
no states are excluded by commission or omission. Having Israel outside the regime
and North Korea observing the first-rate treatment received by India of late from
the United States does not send the message needed to be sent to an Asia that will
increasingly have the resources to support policies of proliferation, if they see them
as beneficial.
Having completed this book over my summer break, I must admit that it is not
an “easy read.” But it stands as the only book of its nature available. Truly, our
young students who wish to address policy issues associated with nuclear weapons
in Asia will need it. As a Cold Warrior who witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis from
the Underground of the Strategic Air Command and the Joint Strategic Target
Planning Staff in Omaha and knows firsthand how close we really came to realizing
Armageddon, I am relieved that a book of this nature, and well written as it is, has
finally become available. Its strengths are in presenting the history of the nuclear
issue in a comprehensive manner, as well as addressing the Asian context for the
coming years.
We all hope that nuclear weapons will one day become only a memory for old
colonels to reflect on, but until that day comes, a genuine understanding of the
awesome destructive nature of these devices must be nurtured among members of
our policy community. The corollary is the imperative to seek the best international
systems to control and limit the use and possession of nuclear weapons. In these
respects Muthiah Alagappa and his excellent team have done us all a service. It is
well worth your time.
John E. Endicott
Woosong University
2005 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee—Limited Nuclear Weapons Free Zone for
Northeast Asia
Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 331 pages. ISBN 9780691134918,
$29.95 cloth. James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer. 2008.
This book’s title leaves no doubt as to its main thesis—the patent system is not living
up to its putative role, and rather than serving as a powerful provider of incentives
for innovation, it has become a source of costs that, in most sectors of the economy,
actually outweigh the benefits. The intellectual property rights that the system
dispenses do provide private returns to their holders, “but taking the effect of other
owners’ patents into account, including the risk of litigation, the average public firm
outside the chemical and pharmaceutical industries would be better off if patents
did not exist” (p. 16). The question asked is not whether property rights might be
desirable for the intangible products of invention but whether patents in fact do
work well as property. “The economic effectiveness of any property system depends
not just on what it sets out to do, but also on the laws, regulations, institutions, and
norms that implement the system . . . the messy details of how patents work matter”
(pp. 7–8).
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The book’s criticism of the patent system is organized around the notion of the
“notice” function of property, i.e., the ability of the system to notify non-owners of
property boundaries. Such a function is problematic for patents because of the
intangible nature of the underlying assets. The failure of patents to provide clear
notice as to the scope of the claimed property inevitably exposes inventors to costly
disputes and litigations. The central empirical aim of the book is to determine how
such costs compare to the benefits that patents confer to their owners. To assess the
(private) value of patents, the book presents the results of two main approaches.
One relies on patent renewal behavior. Because owners must pay a fee at regular
intervals to keep a patent valid, a decision not to renew indicates that the holder
values the patent in question at less than the preset renewal fee. Data on renewal
decisions are therefore informative as to the distribution of patent values, and,
given some ancillary assumptions, one can calculate the average value of a patent
(and thus the value of the populations of patents). The other method of valuing
patents, which can be used for public firms, relies on the study of the firms’ market
value vis-à-vis their assets and patents portfolio. The expected cost of patent litigation is teased out from data on how the stock price of public firms reacts to the news
of patent lawsuit filings. The authors find that apart from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, the expected cost of disputes and litigations has considerably
exceeded the total imputed value of patents (to the firms themselves) since the
mid-1990s. On the whole, therefore, for most industries the patent system is
proving to be a tax for innovators rather than an incentive.
The remainder of the book provides an interpretation of the increasing cost of
litigation that started in the 1990s, discusses the role of patents for small inventors,
and, by focusing on the proliferation of patents for abstract claims, makes a comprehensive case for the negative impact of software patents. The authors argue that
to be effective, patent reform must address the problem of patent notice squarely by
making patent claims more transparent and restricting vague language and overly
abstract claims. Other proposed changes include increasing patent fees and tightening the non-obviousness standard to stem the flood of patents and promoting
deference by the Federal Circuit to the Patent Office on matters of claim
interpretation.
This is an ambitious book. It marshals an impressive array of evidence, ranging
from sophisticated empirical economics to the actual workings of legal institutions,
to support a striking conclusion: except for the chemical and pharmaceutical
industries, the U.S. patent system might actually be an obstacle to innovation. The
analysis is tantalizing, but just how convincing is it? One of its avowed principles is
to eschew lofty theorizing in favor of a careful empirical construction. Perhaps a
tighter theoretical framework would help clarify matters. Conclusions such as
“reform should push the patent system toward the real property system by making
patent claims more similar to the boundary of land” (p. 239) betray an unresolved
ambivalence about the nature of intellectual property rights. That these rights must
be distinctive, one might argue, is precisely because standard property rights, which
typically work well for “private goods,” are ill-suited to deal with the “public good”
nature of the products of inventive activities, the private value of which can be easily
destroyed by the free riding of imitators. As for what the data themselves can tell us,
as many an economist knows, clear and convincing empirical results are rare. Take,
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for example, the estimation of patent values based on patent renewals, which plays
a critical role in the book’s findings. About 40 percent of patents are renewed to full
term, and for these patents all we know is that the owners value them more than the
few thousands of dollars it takes to renew. That is, renewal data have virtually
nothing to say about the value of the most valuable patents! This points to a
fundamental identification problem, which the book (and others) solves by assumption, by invoking a specific distribution of patent values (e.g., the lognormal).
Similar concerns can be raised about the other empirical methodologies used in the
book to value the private benefits and costs of patents. That might be the best one
can do with patent data, but it still raises the question of whether it is enough to
support the authors’ draconian conclusions.
The book adds to a growing number of dissatisfied voices concerned with the
poor performance of the U.S. patent system. The topic is timely, as the Patent
Reform Act of 2009, working its way through Congress at the time of this writing,
grapples with some of the very issues analyzed in the book. The originality of
Bessen and Meurer’s approach, and the weight and detail of the evidence they
provide, makes the book most worthwhile reading for anyone interested in how
institutions and policies can foster innovation in a market economy.
GianCarlo Moschini
Iowa State University
Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New
Class. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. xvi + 344 pages. ISBN
9780804760782, $27.95 paper. Joel Andreas. 2009.
In surveying the background of China’s fourth-generation leadership,
it is impossible to miss one unifying characteristic. They are all engineers and
many attended China’s preeminent institution of higher learning—Tsinghua
University. How did a Communist Party forged in the countryside and dedicated to
the radical redistribution of resources produce rule by technocratic elites? Rise of
the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class by
Joel Andreas answers this question through a sociological history of Tsinghua
University.
The book builds upon existing literature concerning the formation of social
classes. In particular, it investigates the tendency for communist countries, despite
class-leveling rhetoric, to produce technocratic regimes led by elite institutiontrained engineers. It challenges the argument posed by George Konrad and Ivan
Szelenyi that all communist revolutions are essentially designed to displace private
with public property, markets with planning, and all under the leadership of
intellectuals. Rise of the Red Engineers, however, argues that the turbulent and highly
contentious relationship between China’s intellectual elite and the Party-State apparatus reveals that there was no plan for rule by the former. Maoist China began with
a fair degree of pragmatic technocratic cooperation between elites, but this gave way
to increasing efforts at class leveling and a downplaying of the value of experts. Only
after the Cultural Revolution did a solidly technocratic regime emerge. Andreas
shows that it was these efforts to tear down both intellectuals and political elites that
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prompted them to integrate and aggressively defend their mutual interests. This
reaction to common threats, not some grand intellectual design by the revolutionaries, created the technocratic elite.
Andreas uses Pierre Bourdieu’s logic of three kinds of unevenly distributed
capital (social or political, cultural, and economic) to explain class formation. After
communist revolutions, economic capital is seized from former elites and transferred to the state. However, those with political capital (defined by party membership) or cultural capital (defined by education) are able to retain class advantages
because their skills are necessary to manage the means of production. Andreas uses
events at Tsinghua University to illustrate this pattern. Tsinghua was the center of
bureaucratic, political, and even physical battles over China’s education and political systems. These battles were over the most equitable yet still pragmatic means of
political and academic credentialing. Experiments eventually carried out across
China were often initiated at Tsinghua. Thus, the case study provides a window into
the extent that China’s rulers attempted to break the monopoly on cultural capital
held by former regime elites, and wrest away political power vested in the families
of revolutionaries, as well as the degree to which they failed.
The book is divided into four historical segments. “Building Socialism” concerns
the development of the political and academic credentialing systems at the university from 1949 to 1966. “The Cultural Revolution” addresses the most radical
attempt to redistribute cultural capital and the simultaneous assault on political
capital and privilege. Andreas argues that this attack on both sets of elites inadvertently led to unity and the forging of a new class. However, “Institutionalizing the
Cultural Revolution” shows how China, from 1969 to 1976, used various mechanisms to prevent this new class from reemerging or regenerating its pre-1966
privileges. The final section, “The New Era,” reveals the speed with which the
institutions of egalitarian education and mass-supervision collapsed after Mao’s
death. The political and educational credentialing systems were rapidly rebuilt and
university entrance examinations were reinstated. The elderly revolutionaries who
had held political authority at all levels since 1949 were retired, opening opportunities for “Red Experts” trained before the Cultural Revolution. These new leaders
rose rapidly in their factories and offices, some to national power. The book
concludes by musing on the impact that economic reforms will have on the ability
of the current technocratic elites to yet again reproduce their distinct advantages.
Andreas’s argument that China did not intend to build a technocratic class is well
supported by his narration of Tsinghua’s history. He uses primary source and
interview-based research to show the shifting class makeup of the student body
since the revolution and the impact of different experiments on the students and
teachers. Using 98 interviews with alumni and professors at Tsinghua and its
attached middle school, Andreas builds a convincing case for initial class hostility
and gradual unification through the Mao era. The one weakness is that the interviewees, particularly those from the Cultural Revolution era, were mostly from a
single faction—Jinggangshan—which may have limited Andreas’s perspective on the
conflict and the actual alignment of factions during this time. The interviews were
supplemented with records of newspapers, editorials, and official statistics from the
various time periods. These records add context to the interviews, helping to
explain where individuals received their influences and to verify their claims.
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Scholars of Chinese politics, political economy, and modern history should find
this book a useful addition to existing scholarship on China’s fourth-generation
leadership. This book also provides insights for those studying China’s economic
modernization. The final chapter notes the difficulty much of the technocratic
leadership has in adapting to the market economy. It may be that China’s innovation and technological strengths and weaknesses have arisen in part because of the
training of their leaders as engineers and not as entrepreneurs. However, it is also
in this chapter that Andreas arguably misinterprets the challenges faced by the Red
Engineers and their progeny in the new economy. Rather than weakening the hold
of China’s existing technocratic class, reform may instead have strengthened their
control. China’s richest citizens are the heirs of political leaders. Political capital has
transferred itself into economic capital. It may be that cultural power is declining in
importance relative to political and economic, but in many cases there remains a fair
degree of overlap. While the current technocratic class is likely to become less
technocratic over time and more business and economic capital oriented, the
membership will remain largely the same. Nonetheless, as Andreas notes, Tsinghua
will remain at the top of this structure, training the next generation of China’s
leaders.
Michael Murphree
Georgia Institute of Technology
Environment
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Localist Movements in a Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 312 pages.
ISBN 978-0262512329, $25.00 paperback. David J. Hess. 2009.
Localist Movements in a Global Economy is a comprehensive, thorough, and evenhanded discussion of the phenomenon of localism, which David Hess defines as
“the movement in support of government policies and economic practices oriented toward enhancing local democracy and local ownership of the economy”
(p. 2). Hess asks whether localism, which has been intensifying as communities
have become dominated by multinational capital, can contribute meaningful solutions to the world’s social and environmental problems. In trying to answer this
question, he reminds readers that localism is a heterogeneous phenomenon, so
global generalizations should be made cautiously. That said, he argues that at
best, localism can redress environmental and social-justice problems only partially.
The main reason for localism’s limited efficacy is that communities face numerous
constraints and incentives that are driven by forces that originate at the
state, national, and international levels. Quite simply, “opting out” of the global
economic system, even if many people do it, is not enough to change the world.
Instead, localism must be rooted in a larger project to construct an alternative,
locally based global economy—one that is driven by environmental and equity
concerns rather than the interests of global multinational corporations.
To support this argument, Hess begins by examining some theoretical claims
about the benefits of localism (Chapter 2). He rejects the idea that localism fits
neatly within the parameters of conventional political ideologies, observing that